Author: judyfong

This year, Jón will be representing our LVL group at the LREC 2018 conference happening this week in gorgeous Miyazaki, Japan. Jón will be presenting the paper, “Open ASR for Icelandic: Resources and a Baseline System.” As co-author, Anna, says, “The paper describes the language resources used in the project Open ASR for Icelandic: the Málrómur speech corpus, the Leipzig Corpora Collection and the Icelandic pronunciation dictionary, and their processing for the utilization in the training of the ASR system. Furthermore, we experiment with different content of the acoustic training corpus to examine the impact of carefully selected speech data on the WER of the ASR system.” To learn more, read their paper and visit ASR_Resources_LREC2018_A0_portrait_final to get the details that they weren’t able to fit in.

We wish Jón a good conference and lots of fun on a different island!

For those who weren’t able to view the poster in person, we have a PDF of it below:

On the 27th of April, we will be presenting the web portal for our project, a Free and Open Speech Recognition for Icelandic. The ASR will be the opening topic of the Language Technology Seminar, followed by other language technology talks and presentations. The seminar takes place at Reykjavík University, room M101 on Friday, April 27th, 2018 12:00PM.

The automatic speech recognizer was previously demoed at UTMessan and University Day but after the seminar it will be publicly available at https://tal.ru.is/ for newer devices. To get a better idea of how our Open Icelandic ASR works, watch the following Icelandic news segment:

But if you don’t know any Icelandic and just want to use the API, then follow us for updates.

LVL grows even larger with Associate Processor, Hrafn Loftsson, joining our lab. His past work includes IceNLP. and the Almannaromur Icelandic speech corpus. Natural Language Processing is his primary focus.

Without further ado LVL would like to welcome Hrafn, and we hope that he’ll lend his expertise to the rest of the LVL projects. If you would like to read more about him, you can check out his bio or his Reykjavik University page.

On an unrelated note: We also have added another project to our projects page, TTS for Icelandic.

Last fall Michal was interviewed by a broadcast journalist for the BBC Arabic segment, BBC 4 Tech. The interview was regarding some early research he did with the Cognitive workload monitoring using voice project. The BBC 4 Tech segments have been uploaded onto YouTube with voice-overs in Arabic.

Above is Michal explaining his part in the research to the interviewer, Anees.

Thanks to the BBC team you’ll get the distinct pleasure of seeing one of our own speaking Arabic, albeit dubbed, if you select play:

On Saturday Róbert and Anna also presented a prototype for an automatic speech recognition web service for general Icelandic (Vefgátt fyrir íslenskan talgreini). This speech recognizer for Icelandic will be made available to the public later this spring.

LVL members explain how to use the ASR.Róbert presents the microphone to attendees to try out the Icelandic ASR for themselves.

We are delighted to be participating in the project “Icelandic Youth Language: An Empirical Study of Communicative Resources” headed by dr. Helga Hilmisdóttir at The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Using Eyra, Teenage group conversations will be recorded and annotated during the project and used to study linguistic features such as communication patterns, vocabulary, imagery, inflection, sentence order and voice. The data will also be used to improve language technology for teenage voices.